Flummoxed? Translate your edu-speak here.

Ever wondered what on earth all those phrases, terms and acronyms in education mean? Who knows their PaCT from their aSStle, their Data Drive Assessment from their GERM? And just what is Quality Teaching?

Data Driven Assessment (noun): A test made by a corporation and protected from peer review by intellectual property laws and strict confidentiality agreements whose purpose is to provide numbers too complicated and nuanced for the general public to understand, but vague enough that they can be molded into a variety of purposes as the need for “data” to support reforms arises.

Reformer (noun): A person who really wants to win an election or get paid by somebody who won an election.

Value-Added Score (noun): The application of a scientific, statistical model designed for predicting outcomes to assessment scores. A model allows constants to become variables and vice versa. When applied in real time, in real life, with attached consequences for the resulting data, this becomes a synonym for “self-fulfilling prophesy.”

My addition is this:

National Standards (noun, pl.): fuzzy benchmarks pertaining to nothing in particular but which allow students, schools and teachers to be judged as failing, okay or adequate depending on how near the country is to an election.